LGM Film Club, Part 495: Exiled

Tonight, let’s focus on one of Johnnie To’s excellent Hong Kong gangster films, 2006’s Exiled. For a film like this, the plot actually makes a lot of sense–there’s a hit ordered on a gangster who has come back to town. The problem is that the person ordered to do the hit and the other gangster dedicated to protect the guy are both friends with the guy. They all try to do their duty and there’s an initial shootout but no one gets killed (of course). This all blows up in their faces when the evil boss of the first gangster discovers what’s up and then they try to make up for it by taking a contract killing on the side, which happens to also include their boss. Can our friends make their way out of this? There’s a lot of weird jocular manly bonding between the five guys involved and there’s some awesome setpieces of violence too. Like a lot of these directors, To wears their influences on their sleeve–not once, but twice to do see our gangsters shoot the objects away from people a la the hat shooting scene in For a Few Dollars More, for example. But for this genre, you can’t do better than To and whether this is his best film or not, I’m not sure, but it’s right there with Vengeance and Election as my favorites.